The Empire Eats Itself

By Breckyn Forcey

America wears a flag like a hospital gown

Open in the back, 

Stitched with myths,

And stained with forgetting.

America is a mansion

With gold doorknobs

And blood under the floorboards.

She serves champagne to billionaires

While children drink lead

From faucets lined in rust. 

She trims her hedge with hedge funds

And calls it growth. 

A man in a suit builds rockets

While women bleed out in parking lots,

Told their wombs

Are public domain now.

Told the state knows better

Than the scream in their own bones.

Told choice 

Was a luxury 

They no longer qualify for.

Here, 

Truth is a contortionist,

Bent to fit the pockets of billionaires

Who eat futures

With gold-plated forks.

We are taught 

That corporations are people 

And people

Are statistics.

That health is a product,

And justice

A lottery ticket.

We pledge allegiance

to a nation in flames

And call the fire progress. 

The constitution hangs

Like an antique rifle

Polished, unused,

And pointed at the past.

There are billionaires

Hoarding hope like canned goods

Buying silence,

Rewriting futures with ink

That never smudges.

They fly to the stratosphere

To escape the mess they made,

Leave the rest of us

Clawing at ceilings

That were never glass

Just mirrors.

I watch children practice lockdown drills

With the same small hands

They used to build block towers.

I watch women bleed rights onto pavement

While men in pressed suits debate

Whether their pain is marketable.

I watch ice melt like a throat closing 

The planet begging in a language we’ve muted

For convenience

And still

They tell us

It’s working

That this is what democracy looks like.

No.

This is what grief looks like

When it’s forced to wear red, white, and blue.

America,

You are the unfinished poem 

Scratched into the desk of a student

Who was never taught how to dream

Outside a test score.

You are the choir singing

God Bless the Wall Street Bell

While nurses wear garbage bags

 And teachers buy their own chalk. 

In this land,

The richer you are,

The fewer laws apply.

And the poorer you are,

The more your body

Is considered a crime scene.

A mother crosses borders

With her baby sewn to her chest,

Running from a fire lit by a country

That now greets her

With cages.

We tell her there is no room. 

But we make room

For oil.

For stock options.

For the next war

That looks good on a campaign ad. 

She speaks in the language of survival,

But we don’t translate pain

Without profit. 

And still,

Women march

With coat hangers raised like broken flags, 

With rage etched on their hips

And hope curled

In the fists of their daughters.

America says: We are a land of opportunity.

But what she means is:

Opportunity is gated.

And guarded,

And written in fine print

On the back of a billionaire’s yacht.

She sells freedom

Like a brand

And puts compassion 

On backorder.

But I believe 

Not in her institutions,

her marble monuments,

her eagle-bled slogans

But in the quiet rebellion

Of kindness.

Still

We rise

Not from pride,

But from protest.

Not for stars and stripes,

But for the quiet revolutions

Happening 

In every corner

They pretend not to see:

In the fire escape garden 

A girl plants in the Bronx.

In the protest signs

Written in every language grief knows.

In the hands 

that still reach for the broken

When all the headlines say,

Step over.

A girl teaching her grandmother English

On a subway bench.

An immigrant writing code

For a country

That won’t learn his name

But needs his hands. 

There is a country

Buried inside the country.

So let them keep their towers,

Let them count their coins

Until they choke on them. 

We are the fire in the foundation.

The cracked voice 

That still sings.

We are

The America

They don’t advertise

And we are not done

Rising.